Blue Smoke and Murder

34

SEPTEMBER 15

11:22 A.M.

At least this won’t be a total waste of time,” Zach said, glancing at his watch.

“Why?”

“Take a look behind you.” He gestured toward a long wall hung with the kind of Western art that gave meaning to the word fine.

Jill turned, drew in a quick breath, and headed toward the wall without a backward look.

Zach enjoyed the view. Eagerness and impatience with all the game playing put something special in her walk.

Even the guard noticed.

Zach followed her toward the wall of art. Along the way, he picked a catalogue off the top of a stack. The pages of the catalogue, like the long wall, featured art from the upcoming auction in Las Vegas. Nearly all the paintings had traditional or modern gilt frames. Many of the canvases were big enough to fill the wall above the mantel of a trophy mansion in Vail or Telluride, Aspen or Taos.

Or a museum.

Jill did a quick turn down the long wall, then a much slower one. Either way, the results were the same.

“Incredible,” Jill said when Zach came to stand beside her.

“No argument from me,” he said. “There are some truly fine paintings here.”

“Yet…”

Zach waited.

“I can’t help thinking that Modesty’s paintings are strong enough to hang here and not be put in the shade,” Jill said. “Except for size. None of the paintings in the trunk are more than forty inches on a side.”

“Dunstan didn’t do a lot of big canvases,” Zach said. “He wasn’t painting for the museum trade. He didn’t even keep a full-time studio at his home. He was truly a plein air painter. The great outdoors was his workplace.”

She thought of the near-constant, always unpredictable wind of the Basin and Range country. “Out in the open, big canvases would be nearly impossible to paint. Especially in the wind. Like kites without tails.”

“Most of the time, Dunstan got around on horseback or in an open wagon,” Zach said, remembering what Garland Frost had told him. “Anything much bigger than forty inches on a side was too big to drag through the wilderness.”

“Whoever painted Modesty’s legacy didn’t need a huge canvas to evoke a huge land,” Jill said.

“That’s part of their brilliance. Small paintings that expand your soul in a big way.”

She glanced at him and saw that he was intent on the art in front of him. “You are the unlikeliest connoisseur of fine arts I’ve ever met.”

“It’s the beard stubble.”

“It’s the whole package. You look like an entirely physical man.”

He gave her an entirely male look. “Any time you doubt it, I’ll be glad to demonstrate.”

“I don’t think Ramsey Worthington would appreciate a live sex show,” she said. “But thanks for the thought.”

His smile flashed and vanished like lightning against a storm. He walked slowly along the wall.

“Any favorites?” she asked after a time.

“Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran are always worth spending time with,” Zach said, pointing toward two of the biggest canvases. “Moran, especially. But I prefer his smaller canvases. Less theatrical, more real.” He shrugged. “I’m in a minority.”

“How about Charlie Russell and Frederic Remington?” Jill asked, walking toward two paintings.

“They’re the men who led the charge of cowboys, Indians, and wilderness sojourners into the twentieth century.” Zach looked at the two paintings. “The Russell is a fine example of the genre. The Remington has a signature.”

She bit her lip against laughter. “Not one of his better efforts?”

“Even the best painters turn out ordinary canvases. Fact of life. But most people care more for the signatures than the art. The prestige factor disappears if no one knows the artist’s name.”

“You have a jaundiced view of art collectors.”

“I was in the business for a few years,” he said.

“I thought you were in intelligence.”

“I was.” Still am, sometimes. Just for a different employer. One who understands that bad intel leads to really bad strategy.

“What about the artists who aren’t household names?” she asked, gesturing at the rest of the wall of art. “Some of these paintings are very skillful, both in technique and in evocation. And some of them are barely a step above old magazine illustrations.”

“Some of these were magazine illustrations. Don’t hold it against them. Western art is meant to be accessible. No scholarly explanations are required in order to enjoy it.”

“My professors would call a lot of these sentimental and intellectually naive.”

“Politics, not art,” Zach said. “Used to be that the Church commissioned and explained art. Now it’s the turn of secular priests selling modernism of some stripe to commission and explain. Same claim to moral power, different collection plate.”

Jill watched Zach from the corner of her eye. He didn’t notice. He was looking at each canvas with the eyes of a scholar and the body of a brawler.

If he’d been a painting, she’d have wrapped him up and taken him home.

But he wasn’t, so she concentrated on a large canvas filled with colorful Indian braves and stalwart cavalrymen in blue coats and hats that had been tattered by weather and war.

“My professors would scream,” she said, “but this painting really speaks to me. Guess I’m a natural-born plebe.”

Zach glanced at the painting, then found its page in the catalog. Along with a brief biography of the artist, there was a price range the canvas was expected to bring.

“You’re a plebe with great taste,” he said. “That’s a Howard Ruckelshaus. It’s expected to bring between a million and a million-two. If there are some heavyweight Ruckelshaus collectors at the auction, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the bidding blow right through a million and a half. That’s what auctions are all about-excitement and record prices.”

Jill stared at Zach, saw that he wasn’t kidding, and went back to looking at the paintings. She spent a long time on a bigger-than-life portrait of a drenched, exhausted cowboy in a yellow slicker hauling a saddle in one hand and a bridle in the other. In the corral behind him, his weary horse had its head down, eating a freshly broken bale of hay.

“I’ve been there,” Jill said. “So tired you see double. But the horse has to be fed, watered, and rubbed down before you crash.”

“Code of the West?”

“Code of the ranch. Animals first, humans second.”

The next painting that stopped her was an epic canvas, fresh and vivid, like it had just come from the artist. The canvas showed the driving of the golden spike that symbolically joined the transcontinental railway across the United States. Well-fed Anglo men were congratulating each other on completing an important job.

Yet the focus of the painting was not the successful men in business suits, but rather a large group of Chinese workmen who had been shunted off to one side. They were allowed to witness the event their sweat had made possible, but they weren’t included in the congratulations.

Jill made a small sound and studied the workers. Their faces were individual, unique, subtly heroic, without the bland sameness of the businessmen. Like the cowboy’s horse, the Chinese were bone-tired; unlike the horse, no one was going to see to their needs.

“Remarkable,” she said. “The technique and composition are classical European, yet the Chinese men remind me of nothing so much as the clay army of Xian. Individually human and universal man at the same time.”

“The artist is a Chinese immigrant. Lives in Tucson.” Zach skimmed the catalogue. “Someday he’ll be recognized as the great artist he is. Assuming galleries and collectors can get past a Chinese man painting the old West.”

“That kind of bigotry is disgusting.”

“So are a lot of things that are real. But don’t feel too bad-this canvas is expected to sell in the low six figures. Not bad for a dude who just turned forty.”

Jill laughed softly.

“Something funny?” he asked.

“Just me,” she said. “I have a fine arts degree from one of the most prestigious colleges in the United States, yet many of these paintings are utterly new to me. I hadn’t realized how blatantly Eurocentric my fine arts education was. Most of my professors never got closer to America than Warhol’s Campbell soup can and Jackson Pollock’s premature ejaculations.”

Zach made an odd sound. “I take it you’re not a Pollock fan.”

“I could give you chapter and verse on Pollock’s importance to world art, his daring artistic vision, his slashing intellect, his blah blah blah. Yet his work never spoke to me on any level, including the intellectual. Neither did a lot of English pastoralists, but at least it was possible to admire their technique.”

Zach started to say something, then sensed a person approaching behind them. He turned with startling swiftness and saw a tall, trim man with salt-and-pepper hair that brushed the collar of his dark blue blazer.

Ramsey Worthington had risen to the bait.